from "the phenomenology of will"
Meaning always refers back to meaning and never out of meaningfulness and onto something else. Systems that are bound to meaning can therefore not experience or act without meaning. They cannot go beyond the reference of meaning to meaning, in which they themselves are implied in an ineluctable way. Within the meaningful self-referential organization of the world, one has the possibility of negaton, but this possibility can in turn only be used in a meaningful way. Negations also have meaning, only through the connectable. An attempt to negate meaning at all would therefore presuppose mean?ng again, would have to take place in the world. Meaning is therefore an unnegalable, a category without distinchion [...] 'meaninglessness' can therefore never be gained through the negation of meaningfullness. Meaninglessness is a special phenomenon, it is only possible in the realm of signs and consists in a confusion of signs. - Luhmann
In other words, meaninglessness, or even a currently much-invoked crisis of meaning, can only exist from the point of view of a 'confused' sign level, i.e. at the level of the second-order observer and within the modern and postmodern episteme. We have known since Viktor Frankl that even the most serious circumstances can be overcome by a reference to the future, through meaning, and every psychotherapist worth his salt knows that, to put it profanely, goals cure depression. This also means that any confusion on sign-level (or: crisis of meaning) is alleviated with the post-postmodern episteme in which the difference of actuality and virtuality on the level of basic autopoiesis is harmonized with any more superficial area of symbolic meaning-making by the third-order observer to atain Wiederspruchsfreiheit or internal integrity and consistency.